Looking at role playing from a different angle

Menu

Category Archives: Reviews and Playtests

Note: Sorry guys, this is way later than I expected it to be. The last couple of months have been a bit of a struggle for me, and I’d found it hard to bring myself to write anything. Pushing myself to get back on track again, and hopefully the fact that I’ve got myself into a bit of a steadier routine should help with that.

Okay, time for another review! This time around we’re looking at the first book in The Cleaners series, Enter the Janitor, by Josh Vogt. You might recognise the name from my review of Forge of Ashes. Forge of Ashes was Josh’s debut novel, with Enter the Janitor hot on its heels. It’s a bit of a genre shift as well, jumping from the fairly traditional fantasy (with some decidedly non-traditional elements) of the Pathfinder Tales line to urban fantasy with a comedic bent.

Anyway, enough preamble. Let’s get into the meat of this.

Full Disclosure: I was provided with an e-book of this novel by the author for review purposes. This has in no way influenced my opinion of the work, and this review is a full, fair and honest accounting of my thoughts on it.

Took me a bit longer to finish this book than I hoped. Still, I got there in the end, so it’s time for the my review.

Full Disclosure: I was provided with an e-book of this novel by the author for review purposes. This has in no way influenced my opinion of the work, and this review is a full, fair and honest accounting of my thoughts on it.

Well, it’s been a while. No excuses for it, I’ve just been very, very slack on posting. I’m going to try to get myself back to weekly updates, hopefully on Saturdays or Sundays. To make it easy for now, I’m going to start off with book reviews just to get going again.

So on that note, let’s start with a review of the latest Pathfinder Tales novel.

Full Disclosure: I was provided with an e-book of this novel by the author for review purposes. This has in no way influenced my opinion of the work, and this review is a full, fair and honest accounting of my thoughts on it.

Forge of Ashes

Josh Vogt

Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars

Akina Fairingot, the angriest dwarf on Golarion, prepares to lay a beatdown onto a Forgefiend.

Alright ladies and gentlemen, it’s book review time! Still working on some other updates, but I thought I’d smash this one out-of-the-way while the book is relatively fresh in my mind. It’ll be a quick one, and free of major spoilers, since I’m kind of pressed for time at the moment. Got a lot of stuff on the go at the moment. If I can, I’ll try to come back and write some more in-depth analysis of the book, but this ought to do to get my opinion of it across.

Alright, time for the second round of reviews for the 2014 Canberra International Film Festival. I know I said it’d be up on Wednesday, but I’m afraid I had a most insistent migraine that decided I didn’t really need to do anything but take a bunch of painkillers and go to bed that evening. Who am I to tell the migraine no? So painkillers and bed it was. Even better, I couldn’t open my right eye properly the following morning, went to the doctor and found out that I have an eye infection… in the middle of film festival season. Thankfully I got it checked out before it had time to take hold, and it’s not contagious or too serious, with no impairment to my vision, so I’m still able to ride, work and go see the films. So, soldiering on through it. Unfortunately I still had a lot on to work around the festival as well, so this got pushed back further than I’d have liked.

Before I get stuck in though, I wanted to talk about something real quick. I was thinking the other day about what it is I love about film festivals. Interestingly enough, the biggest thing for me isn’t the films (though obviously they’re a pretty damn important part of it), rather it’s the people I meet. End up sitting next to the right person, strike up a conversation, and you can find out some fascinating stuff. At last year’s Freaky Fridays I met a couple of guys that I’m now hanging out with from time to time, going to the movies with semi-regularly and even helped out with a Tropfest entry by playing a minor role (I got to be a messed up looking vampire, good times!). I met a woman who helped setup the festival years back, and still bump into her at the movies from time to time, leading to plenty of discussions about cinema and what we’ve been watching. Just the other night at the Afterlife screening, I met a guy who comes up from Melbourne for a few weeks every year for the film festival, and had a great chat with him about what we’d both seen so far, as well as talking about the film after it finished. Without something like the festival, odds are that I’d never encounter these people, and I feel like that’d be a real shame. I sometimes have trouble meeting new people, and to have something like this where it can be almost guaranteed that I’m going to share some interests with the people around me really helps boost my confidence to talk to those around me.

Anyway, let’s get started. I’ve got five films to review this time around, but two of them will be reviewed as one due to the way they’re meant to be watched… don’t give me that look, you’ll see what I mean when I get to them. Moving along…

As last time, there may be spoilers, I make no promises, you have been warned. If you want to avoid them entirely except for basic setup spoilers, read the summary of the review, which is shown above the poster for each film. Again, titles link to the CIFF page for each film, which will have a trailer if one is available.

Hey hey! The 2014 Canberra International Film Festival started last Thursday, and I’ve been spending most of my free time since then watching movies. I’ve seen seven of the twenty-two (potentially twenty-three) on my schedule so far, and honestly I’ve loved them all. Unlike last year’s aborted attempt, this year I’m determined to review all of them. In the interests of making that manageable, I’ve set a couple of guidelines for myself. I’ll be reviewing them in batches of four films, and limiting myself to five hundred words per film, give or take a hundred words each. I’ll try to avoid major spoilers, but as always with my reviews, there’s no guarantees, so consider this your fair warning. If you want to be really safe, just read the summary I put at the start of each section. I’ll even put the poster for the movie after each summary so you know where to stop reading, so you know, never say I don’t do anything for you.

Now as I always say, I’m no serious film critic. I tend to go pretty easy on films so long as I find something to enjoy in them, and I make no apologies for that. So far this year I haven’t rated any of the films lower than a 4, and I think last year I only rated one of them as a 1 or 2.

Now that the preamble is out-of-the-way, let’s get this show on the road. For Round 1, I’ll be talking about In Order of Disappearance, Why Don’t You Play In Hell, The Salvation and The Congress. Each title is linked to the page for the film on the CIFF website, if a trailer is available for it, you can find it there.

That’s the first thing I thought when I read volume 1 of Andres Salazar’s comic Pariah, Missouri. For anyone who doesn’t know me well enough to tell, that’s a good thing. A really, really good thing. While I may not get many chances to play in it, Dead Lands has long been one of my favourite RPG settings, and the mix of western and supernatural influences in Pariah, Missouri, scratches the same itch for me. I’m by no means a fantasy purist, in fact the best way to describe it is that I love nothing more than having my chocolate (the fantasy genre) mixed with peanut butter (sci-fi, horror, westerns, whatever genre floats your boat). Note that this only applies to my tastes in fictional media (games, novels, movies, and so on)… bring any actual peanut butter anywhere near me, well, pray the gods have mercy, ’cause I sure as hell won’t. It’s not that I’m allergic or anything, I just really hate the taste of peanuts. Anyway, let’s get this back on track and into the actual review.